Since Livejournal's ability to keep their various services actually running has gotten so much worse this year, I've started divesting myself of reliance on them. Last month, LJ went a full five days without updating RSS feeds, so now I no longer use LJ as my feed aggregator (I'm using NetNewsWire now; it's ok). And last week, LJ was totally down for 4+ hours, meaning that I couldn't use my LJ OpenID token to log in to other sites, so now I'm running my own OpenID provider too (phpMyID, it's really easy).

My question is, what do I use to replace LJ's Jabber server? (Other than Google Chat, obviously.) I'd like my Jabber ID to be "jwz@jwz.org" instead of "jwz@livejournal.com", and I suspect the only way to accomplish that is to run my own Jabber server. Said server would only ever have one person connected to it and would peer with the rest of the network. I tried installing Djabberd, but there is basically nothing in the way of documentation or examples, so I couldn't get it to do anything.

(I imagine the lack of reliability that seems to be Livejournal's new way of doing things -- plus the fact that the site feels like a ghost town now -- will eventually cause me to move this blog to somewhere else. I'm not sure where, though. All the options are bad. Run it on your own site: get no comments but lots of spam. Just use Facebook: effectively limited to friends-only posts. Bleh.)

After months of complaints by European dairy farmers angry over low prices, protesters in Brussels on Monday poured milk onto the streets, hurled eggs and other missiles, and started fires that filled the air with black smoke. Police helicopters hovered overhead as hundreds of tractors - and some cattle -- blockaded the area outside the European Union's headquarters while agriculture ministers met in an emergency meeting.

Scientists were able to conclude that COROT-7b has a similar density and silicate rock makeup to that of Earth. However, the planet and its host star are separated by only 1.6 million miles, which is 23 times less than the distance between our Sun and Mercury. With an orbit much like our Moon's around Earth, one side of COROT-7b always faces towards its Sun, and this side is thought to have a temperature of 4220°F.

As rocks vaporize at that heat it is believed that COROT-7b's precipitation is pebbly. When a "front moves in" pebbles condense out of the air and run into lakes of molten lava on the surface below. Scientists used a computer system that ran different variants yet yielded consistent results - rock showers.

Much like the Earth's atmosphere causes water cloud to form resulting in water droplets, COROT-7b's atmosphere is believed to form rock clouds that then rain little pebbles and other forms of rock.